The Dreams of a Kid, Tied to a Car.(Column)(Column)

Byline: Rich Ceppos

It was a marketing presentation on the new 2004 Pontiac GTO, so the last thing I expected to find was my youth. But there it was, in all its alienated, testosterone-warped, car-crazed excitement and angst, in the form of a beautiful 1964 Pontiac GTO two-door parked in the corner of the meeting hall.

Wham! A Goat-that's what we called them back then-in the same silver paint and red interior trim as the very first one I'd ever seen. That was back in August 1963 and it had sent a jolt through me, like when you're walking down the hallway in junior high school and you come face to face with the girl you have a crush on but are too shy to talk to. And you look the other way and walk on by, but you feel like setting your shoes on fire and running down the hall screaming. Yeah, something like that.

As we all know, the GTO went on to jump-start the muscle car movement that peaked around 1970. It wasn't the fastest of the species, but it was the coolest-and that was enough. The ads seemed to be talking directly to me. There was a song on the radio, Little GTO, that contained all the right words. Today, marketing people working on high-performance cars are always saying, "We want our car to be the one that teenaged boys buy posters of to hang in their room.'' In my youth the GTO was that car. I had GTO posters all over the place.

Three years after that initial GTO sighting, my dad asked me what he should buy for my mother. When an off-white 1967 GTO convertible with black vinyl interior and red-stripe Firestone wide oval tires showed up in our driveway, I came to believe in miracles. If this could happen to pimply faced, no-girlfriend, high-school me, then surely ...